Becuase my art is about people, and visual sociology has many cross overs with art. Though no doubt the purist in both camps will hate me for such a statemet... I have some research questions and I use art practice to go abut answering them, but I am always asking myself the questions, "what makes me qualified to be the one to make assumptions on behalf of other people? Who am I to say that what I am saying is right?" Perhaps there is no way of really knowing definitive answers like that, but if I look to precedents in related discplines this may help me think through my own answers.

Its about methodology for me. How can I use what I am creating in a way that is effective in eliciting answers to my research questions? I've not studied sociology so I need to know the lay of the land before I go out there like a bull in a china shop. So far what we have been doing has been reaffirming my own approaches, rather than teaching me anything new, but this is good. I need the reality check that what I am doing is sane and there are precedents out there.  It's interesting being here with a whole bunch of sociologists and a few anthropologists, and finding that neither is able to articulate succintly what the difference between the two actually is. This is another question that may never be answered, because everyone seems to have their own interpretation on it.

I don't know why, but I really (clearly naively) thought that there might be at least a couple of artists here but no, to my knowledege not a soul. Yet artists are often looking at the same things that  visual sociologists are looing at, just from a different point of view, so it would make sense to combine forces. Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting. Why isn't there more interdiscplinary communication? Are we really so protective of our own fields we don't want to help the others out? In discussions and group work, I find myself having to remind the people that I am with that what we are doing is visual, not just theoretical, and that we can use images for more than just evidence that something is happening.... and I am learning from the sociologists alot more about people,  how they behave, their representations and the ways in which others who do not have an art background interpret images, which is invaluable. The relationship is symbiotic.

So much of the "participatory" methods that have been discussed and theorised as novel ways of research are what community artists have been doing for decades. The difference I can see though is that whilst the artists facilitate ways of empowerment though art for communities, I've not observed so much of the products of community art then being used as artefacts which can articulate research outcomes. I guess this is because community artists are not going in with an agenda of elicitiing information, instead they are facilitating creativity and self expression. But, what a great team a visual sociologist and a community artist could make.... incidentally I am neither and do not have any desire to fill this niche  myself, but I can still recognise the potentials that are there.

I had my first Thesis Monitoring meeting yesterday and it was very enlightening. Thesis Monitoring is where a couple of academics who aren't your supervisors sit down with you and go through your progress to date. The term "thesis" in this context can be a littel misleading becuase at my stage I've not started my thesis, and since my phd is art practce based, further downt he track it will be about the progress of what I am making as well.  It's supposed ot occur every 6 months during your phd. In my case somehow administratively I had fallen between the cracks, so I had to do a bit of jumping up and down to get mine done....

It was pointed out to me in thesis monitoring that my current title is really dense and there is alot in it. I don't mind people pullng my work apart critically. It needs to be done, and I have been craving ANY kind of critical feedback on my work, so this was great. Every word in my current title is loaded with its own set of concepts and yes, looking at it, it could be very difficult to work out the main focus.  I think possibly that semiotics is a theme underpinning what I do, but not neccessarily the main driver. Signs and symbols are definately important to what I am doing, not only how they are evidenced in images, but actually what a person's behviour or their environment may signify.

Its funny, the thesis and wirting up is still a long way off, but if one has a title then there is something to hang things off when talking to others.... even thoough the title will probably change a million times before the final hand-in. I guess, its a bit like a focal point, something solid in that shifting snowdome of ideas.

I was thinking the title s more along the lines of: Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of photography but then again if I think about it properly, photography is just one area, even though it is one of my main areas. My work is about people too.. it's about how people act and respond to images and the spaces in which they view them. People are very important in what I do. I want to somehow make life a bit lighter, happier, interesting through my art. We're all too jaded these days. Perhaps a better title is something like:

Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of image practices.
 

Imagine a snow dome that someone has shaken up. Each snowflake is a thought or idea relating to your work. They whirl around and sometimes settle in groups or create intricate patterns caused by storms of thought. Some melt away into nothing while others form crystalline shapes and structures that later  you work into sculptural forms. You show these to other people and this opens up a forum for discussion and debate… The snow dome has been turned again.

This is what it is like to be doing an art phd, one which is based on research through making things and being a practicing artist, rather than one based  on historical  or theoretical research. I’m not a sculptor, but this is the only way I can describe the process… and there are days, like today when the snowdome is such a flurry of inspiration and ideas I don’t know where to start when writing about them. Instead I have to go and make, for words are too slow and can't yet articulate what is going on in my head – I have to go and shape my snowflakes into forms that enable me to communicate with others.

The tagging workshop below has really been a source of ideas, and then yesterday we had “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research” which was a student led symposium done through the Visual Research Centre located in Dundee Contemporary Arts and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. I had a very minor role in helping get it organised, but most of the credit really goes to Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Solfrank. The discourse that came out of it was really thought provoking and when the snowflakes have settled in the snowdome I shall write a little more about it.  

I’ve just spent the last 2 days in a workshop with Branded Meeting Places project at Edinburgh University. They have been great!! I met with a diverse group of people from a range of disciplines, yet we all had interests in common which made the group a very inspiring one.

We’d been brought  together for a workshop on tagging, looking at how these may be utilised in linking the physical world with the virtual. I’d been invited on account of my work with QR codes, and it has definitely given me a great food for thought with my own research. In particular The Branded Meeting Places group have been collaborating with Mobile Acuity who create image recognition software, to come up with Spellbinder which on their website is described as:

“..a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors”

The creative scope for this is really limitless, especially when I think of it in the context of my own art practice.

On the first day we brainstormed ideas surrounding tagging. In groups we came up with possible applications of tagging and presented them to a vote to take one forward to build overnight. As it was 2 ideas were melded and three dedicated programmers worked through the night and morning to give us a working application to pay with.

The application that was built was called “Vocal Thumbs” which enables people to voice their opinions in a way which facilitates social networking via mobile phone. We were hoping to use audio, but that was not possible in the short turnaround time, but “Vocal Thumbs” worked via text messaging, so we all went out, tagged parts of Edinburgh, found each other’s tags and tested the system.

This very intensive group working to come up with a concept, build it and test it in 2 days is a very productive way of testing a concept and gaining feedback in a very short time frame. I think though, it is very reliant on the mix of people involved. Everyone there was positive,  committed to research and motivated in coming up with new ideas, and this enthusiasm was contagious. That is not to say however, at the end of each day we were a bit tired, but that good kind of tired where you feel like you’ve achieved something.

A couple of weeks ago I attend a course on Free Choice Profilng which is a research method enabling qualitative data to be quantified more “scientifically"  <! --cynical thought:  because scientific enquiry always seems to have more credibility than any other…>

Free Choice profiling was devised to determine perceived  flavours in cheeses and ports, where tasters created lists of descriptive words which they then later ranked for each cheese/ port. Rather than being a yes/ no questionnaire or having terms defined by the researcher, the participants determined the terms to be used (hence the term “free choice profiling). This then has the potential to have a wider range of definitions and terms which may not occur to the researcher. The results are then calculated using GenStat (statistics package) with some customised software to establish areas of consensus amongst participants.

This method can be seen as wholistic rather than reductionist because the results process looks at areas of consensus as opposed to areas of difference. If you think of the classic placebo effect tests, they are usually searching for differences in the participants results to ascertain whether there is anything of significance going on.
But of course you can’t apply such methods to things like tasting wine and cheese, where it make more sense to work on  areas of consensuses where a critical mass of participants are holding similar views.

Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder has been a pioneer in using this methodology, particularly in areas of animal welfare, with the use of videos of livestock animals. Whilst I still have my reservations about the use of the technique in this way being anthropomorphic (attributing human emotions to animals), the actual process and Wemelsfelder’s use of visual material is for me an excellent  means finding answers to some questions my research has been asking.

Although I am an artist, I am the type of person who wants to be able to have repeatable results to illustrate my points. Free Choice Profiling is perhaps one way I can do this, given that the nature of my work is so subjective and based on people’s interpretations and emotional responses to images.